The fight to provide housing for every Oregonian was led by unlikely activists

When Gov. Tom McCall pushed and prodded Oregonians to produce our unique growth management system, he focused almost exclusively on protecting farms, forests and the state’s other scenic wonders.

He talked about protecting Oregon from “grasping wastrels of the land.” He argued that nothing is “more valuable than the pristine environment of the state.” And, in his distinctive Boston Brahmin accent, he raged against sagebrush subdivisions and coastal condo-mania.

What he didn’t say much about was how Oregonians would live inside those new urban growth boundaries, which were designed to keep sprawl from the state’s countryside.

“Originally, it was a growth management push,” said Ed Sullivan, a retired land-use lawyer who has watched the system evolve since its beginning. “It was aimed to stop development in inappropriate places.”

Shaping Oregon’s urban and suburban life under growth controls was largely left to others – many of them people with far less acclaim or influence than McCall, the state’s most iconic governor.

One was a 1950s homemaker turned citizen activist named Betty Niven. The other was a land-use lawyer named Al Johnson.